60 GHz Spatial Radio Transmission: Multiplexing or Beamforming?

This paper compares the capacity improvement capability of spatial multiplexing and beamforming techniques for 60 GHz spatial transmissions in a multi-carrier radio system such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. The term beamforming in this paper refers to the conventional gain focusing, for the strongest propagation path, by narrow antenna beams. Our channel capacity metric depends only on the multipath richness of the propagation channel and the antenna aperture size, but is otherwise independent of the realization of antenna elements on the aperture. Our analysis also reveals the spatial degrees-of-freedom (SDoF) of the radio channel, which is the maximum number of antenna elements on the aperture for efficient spatial multiplexing. We evaluate the capacity and SDoF of single-polarized 60 GHz radio channels measured in an office environment. Our results show that the radio channel offers multiple SDoFs both in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios such that spatial multiplexing can improve the channel capacity, provided that the receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is sufficiently high to utilize them. Under -10 dBm of the transmit power, the high receive SNR is guaranteed when the antenna aperture size is larger than 1λ² in LOS and 9λ² in NLOS scenarios, respectively.